Onomasticon Oasiticum

"In the Avertissement (p.vii) to his well known study Les Oasis d’ Égypte (Cairo1987), and on many pages elsewhere in this volume, the late Guy Wagner alludes to an exhaustive prosopography of the Great Oasis, compiled by himself but unfortunately for financial reasons not incorporated in Les Oasis. However, a separate publication of this prosopography, as announced in the Avertissement, did not appear either. Therefore, the need for such a prosopography remained unfulfilled.The idea of composing a new onomasticon of the Dakhleh Oasis, or an Onomasticon Mothiticum as we wish to call it, was born independently during the 5th Dakhleh Oasis Project conference held in Cairo, June 2006, where Worp gave a paper on Christian names in fourth century documents from Kellis. An additional incentive for compiling such an onomasticon was the consideration that Worp himself had already published a substantial numberof documentary papyri, ostraka and wooden tablets from this area ( in particular in P.Kellis, vol.I, and in O.Kellis). It was, therefore, only a matter of merging his various indices nominum and adding names of persons from the Dakleh oasis figuring in papyri and ostraka already published elsewhere. This activity involved collecting the relevant texts from, e.g., the list given by Wagnerin the introduction to his Les Oasis, pp. 3- 6, and a search in the Heidelberger Gesamtverzeichnisfor ‘Ort = Grosse Oase’). Moreover, our colleague R.S. Bagnall kindly made the digital file of hisown index nominum for P.Kellis IV available to Worp.An onomasticon of the eastern part of the Great Oasis, the Khargeh oasis, i.e. anOnomasticon Hibiticum, had also been a desideratum for a long time. In the 1980s Salomons,when working on his publication of Bodleian Papyri (in P.Bodl., vol. I, in which appear severaltexts from the Khargeh oasis) had already compiled an onomasticon of this part of the Great orTheban Oasis for his own use, based exclusively on the papyrological evidence then available tohim. But the subsequent publication of the various volumes of ostraka from Douch, Aïn Waqfaand other texts from the Hibite nome, mainly by French papyrologists in the 1990s, had made thisprivate onomasticon obsolete and underlined the desirability of an Onomasticon Hibiticum,especially if combined with an Onomasticon Mothiticum.Thus the two of us decided to cooperate in compiling an Onomasticon Oasiticum:Salomons took responsability for texts from the eastern Oasis and the incerta, while Worp tookresponsabilty for the listing of personal names in documents from the western Oasis..."